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[Hyndis]

Posting in a new thread, by request:



I like the idea of dead creatures in an evil biome having a chance to reanimate if they are not in a tomb. The corpse turns into a zombie/skeleton of that same creature type. If the zombie/skeleton is "slain" it turns back into a corpse. But the kicker is that the corpse can then get back up again! Make it maybe a 10% chance per month? Something like that, the numbers can be adjusted. This means that if you have a bunch of non-butchered, non-entombed corpses somewhere they will eventually rise up as zombie or skeletal versions of themselves.

A butchered corpse is taken apart into many tiny pieces so thats not an issue. A corpse in a coffin is secured, so thats also fine. Its the things sitting around in your refuse stockpile, or perhaps you don't want to clean up after a siege, which means you'll get some undead goblins rising up from the bloody mess if you don't handle it.

You could even exploit this to create your own undead mosh pit. Toss a bunch of corpses into a pit. The corpses will have a 10% chance per month to reanimate, so eventually all of them will be active again. Toss anyone you don't like into the pit. The undead will tear them apart, and then Urist McUseless will rise from the dead to join the undead. You could even use this as an archery training range. You can't kill something thats already dead, all you can do is knock them down for a while, but the undead have a disturbing tendency to get right back up again unless the corpse is destroyed. Butchering it will do this, but simply putting some crossbow bolts into it won't.

An undead pit would make for a horrific sort of trap. Make your entrance have drawbridges over the pit of the undead. Drop a goblin siege into the pit. See how well they do against the army of the undead! They will of course eventually lose. Even if they win at first, those corpses will stand up again. And again. And again. All slain goblins will also stand up again. And again. And again.

This could be so much FUN. 

 

[FallingWhale]

I would use a pump river that pushed goblins, nobles, and mules into an undead mauling room behind grates, the hard part would be dropping them all in without flow loss

I would have some evil biomes have a ghoul-prone tag so that evil wouldn't always be uncontrollable death

[Dakkan]

I really like this idea. It show's where undead are coming from, and replenishes their stocks. With the chance of a skeleton getting up multiple times however, I think undead combat may need to be tweaked a bit, mainly that the undead aren't truly down for the count till they've been dismantled. Hack a zombie's legs off? It crawls after you. Hack his arms off too? It becomes a gnawing land mine. Once a creature re-animated there really isn't a way to "kill" it other than complete dismemberment, because it really shouldn't be alive to begin with.

Here are a few previous suggestions of similar things, but some are fairly old.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=2896.msg47921#msg47921
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=3128.msg50101#msg50101
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=29389.msg383107#msg383107
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=38537.msg645731#msg645731

[Josephus]

A butchered corpse is taken apart into many tiny pieces so thats not an issue. A corpse in a coffin is secured, so thats also fine. Its the things sitting around in your refuse stockpile, or perhaps you don't want to clean up after a siege, which means you'll get some undead goblins rising up from the bloody mess if you don't handle it.

Actually, can you imagine a butchered corpse returning from the dead? A thousand tiny zombie gibs trying to organ you to death!

Which would destroy your frame rate, of course.

[Funkyboy7]

maybe adding to this, have undead who are underground produce miasma? because i don't think the walking dead will remember to shower daily :-P

[existent]

I think this would be super Fun.

Suggestions:
Decapitation = dead zombie. As in, dead.
Underground is pre-populated with Zeds. IE, you're in a "ghoul biome" or whatever, and you're digging out your dining hall, when your miners strike something surprising. Water? No. Magma? No. The living dead.

Also, would they be fast zombies (ala Left 4 Dead or the 28... Later series) or shamblers (ala Romero)?
Or perhaps some of both?

Urist McDwarf is killed by zombie, comes back as fast zombie.
Urist McZombie is killed by axedwarf, comes back as slow zombie (due to rotting/structural damage, etc)
X months later, Urist McZombie comes back as a skeleton (is now fast again).

or some-such.

[Jimmy]

Note that dead dwarves returning to life as undead was actually a feature prior to the end of the 2D arc. I also recall it being one of the dev goals.

[Hyndis]

I was thinking that with regards to spawning undead it would probably be easier from a programming perspective to use a corpse object. If you kill the undead it turns back into an inanimate corpse, with an X% chance to get back up again each month.

The % should be low enough that once you disable the undead you have time to dispose of them. By dispose of them I mean take the corpse to a butcher workshop and rip it apart. This would destroy the corpse object, removing the ability for it to get up again. Likewise with a coffin, it seals the corpse inside the coffin. Essentially its just a corpse object that is sitting on the ground somewhere, and not inside a building. If you want quick disposal use atom smashers on the corpses.

Either way, you just do not want to have corpses laying around your fortress, as that would lead to never ending FUN until those corpses are dealt with.

If you get a handle on things and the corpses are animals, like deer or wolves, your butchers should be able to handle them. If they're sentients you can still butcher them if your civ ethics allows this, if not, atom smasher time. Or magma. Magma always works. If they're dwarves you need to have coffins ready. Unburied dwarves cannot be butchered, and could get up again and cause more mayhem.

It would also be FUN is undead worked differently than other creatures. Undead should aggro on anything living, even if its not a dwarf. Goblins, elves, even living animals should be attacked. This would of course just increase the undead population further, which is what a proper zombie plague should involve.

You still need to dispose of the corpses once your axedwarves carve through the zombie horde so that the undead don't stand up again. 

If you ignore the problem and just wall yourself up, the undead population will keep on increasing. Goblins come to siege your fortress? Undead horde tears them apart. You now have the undead horde in addition to undead goblins. Traders come? Undead elves join the pack! As with all good zombie plagues once they reach critical mass you're in for trouble.

This could be a great challenge as well. Start with the original 7. Wall yourself in. Migrants, goblins, kobolds, and caravans all keep joining the undead. By the time your original 7 have multiplied into 100+ dwarves there should be an undead army outside your walls. Purging the world of the undead would be a worthy challenge. NO MAGMA ALLOWED. Its cheating. Thats too easy. 

[Hyndis]

maybe adding to this, have undead who are underground produce miasma? because i don't think the walking dead will remember to shower daily :-P

Underground undead already produce miasma. Embark in an evil region and dig down. You will encounter things like zombie cave crocodiles and zombie trolls. The zombies produce huge clouds of miasma.

[Dakkan]

It just doesn't make sense for animated dead to 'die' and then rise again at a later point. It's not like they died from loosing too much blood, or a fatal wound on an organ, none of those things apply to undead after they've risen. A major issue with this whole scenario is that we don't have an explanation for why dead rise in evil biomes, and why those areas are evil in the first place. If it's the simple case of "evil magic" then that's a whole new can of worms that needs to be worked out first.

Also, using the butcher's workshop seems strange to deal with corpses with the potential to rise as killing machines. I don't plan on dragging corpses in various stages of decay right into my fortress just to do something that can be taken care of on the field. A much simpler approach would be to do some sort of shallow grave designation, or have dwarves be able to be ordered to destroy corpse. Or even some sort of crematorium, or some sort of simple corpse bonfire.

I completely agree that undead should attack ALL living creatures. Not sure if this applies to material creatures though.

[Hyndis]

You can already butcher undead corpses. Embark on an evil biome, such as a terrifying glacier. You will be attacked by endless herds of zombie and skeletal elk. Assuming your military is up to the task, the elk will be "killed." The zombie elk corpses will be automatically taken to a butcher workshop and broken up into bones and skulls. No usable meat on them obviously, but you at least get the bones.

One thing to keep in mind is that simpler is better. There are already corpse objects in the game. Corpses can be butchered. Butchering a corpse destroys it, removing the corpse object and instead producing other objects. Its just a reaction, like turning copper ore into a copper bar. The ore is destroyed and the bar is created.

If undead are linked to the corpse object, where any corpses on the map that are not inside a building (coffin) has a chance to despawn, and at that location an undead creature, zombie or skeleton, will spawn of the same type.

Kill the zombie/skeleton and you get a corpse again.

That corpse is still a corpse object of that creature type, and if its not dealt with you could get another zombie/skeleton roaming about.

Its just from a mechanics perspective, trying to limit the amount of information the game needs to check, which should keep FPS up. If there is a monthly check that is only 12 checks per year.


I have no idea what programming language Toady uses, but the logic would go like this:

Code: [Select]

On the first of each calendar month check all corpse objects.
For each corpse object check location. Is it in a building? If yes, stop. If no, continue.
Roll a random number between 1 and 100. If 1-89, stop. If 90-100, continue.
Delete corpse object.
Roll a random number between 1 and 2.
If 1 spawn a zombie of the same species.
If 2 spawn a skeleton of the same species.

This simple routine should be very light on processing power, but these few steps will result in allowing undead to roam about, causing all sorts of mayhem and FUN, including creating some very nasty traps, such as pit traps full of undead that you can toss sieges, caravans, or migrants into.

Yes its not completely accurate. Its just cludge by design, to minimize system resource consumption and make it easy to add in. If you kill a skeleton by hacking all of its limbs off, when it rises again it will have its limbs all back. Its not perfect, but its less data for the game to keep track of, so less memory used and less CPU processing power used.

As for why the undead exist? Magic.

Yes, DF has magic. Quite a few creatures exist only because of magic. Creatures made out of fire, or steam, or bronze? Animated skeletons? Why can you create an entire ecosystem on getting the floor wet, and can grow mushrooms forever without adding any energy into the ecosystem? Magic.

Accept it and move on.

[existent]

I have no idea what programming language Toady uses

I believe that he said somewhere that it's in C++.

[Dakkan]

We wouldn't have such a complicated injury system that can keep track of how many teeth a skeleton has lost in a fight only for the corpse to miraculously be completely regenerated again, it's a step in the wrong direction. And I never proclaimed a distaste for magic, only that it's a whole new system that toady needs to implement, and it's going to have rules. Rules that we don't know yet.

Also I never stated that you can't butcher corpses resulting from undead creatures, but that if they had the ability to rise again, I wouldn't want them anywhere near my butcher's shop.

[Untelligent]

This sort of thing with the dead rising from their graves to munch on your dwarves is actually planned to go in the game, sort of. The current "good" and "evil" regions are eventually going to be expanded into having more interesting specific effects, such as a problem with the dead not staying dead.

This sort of thing isn't going in for a while, but it's on the future of the fortress list, which are the features that are going in soonest compared to the rest.

[Pilsu]

I have to disagree with the butcher's shop thing as well. While it might be an option, it shouldn't be the go-to way of getting rid of corpses. Butchering is a fairly involved process and I don't think all races even have access to it. It might also clash with civ morals to butcher sapient corpses. Things like corpse bonfires are more traditional ways of getting rid of the unwanted dead. Smelly, disgusting ways that leave you susceptible to burning zombies and skeletal remains but eh, that just adds to the Fun™.

The problem I see with this suggestion is the fact that in order to kill the undead, you need to hack them to pieces. While this is useful for things like lobbed off hands returning to unlife and trying to strangle some hapless hauler, the torso itself should be harmless by the time the zombie is actually "dead". That is to say, it never dies, you can just neutralize it as a threat.


..hehe. Knuckle worms.